Customer Reviews

Carpentaria: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

How to rate this book? Five stars for the unusual quality of the writing and its unique voice? Or three, to reflect the difficulty I had getting into it? I am going with five, because the quality is indisputable while my reading problems may well be my own; a compromise would neither do justice to this extraordinary book, nor be an adequate warning to the unsuspecting reader.

The setting is the fictional town of Desperance, by the Gulf of Carpentaria on the North coast of Australia. A small citizenry of self-satisfied whites live Uptown, surrounded on three sides by shanty communities of aborigines, who refer to themselves as Pricklebush people. These are their stories: families and splinters of families, living together, splitting, fighting, and coming together again. They are a people living on the outskirts, among the debris of the modern world, yet tied in often-inexplicable ways to the land or the sea. They are a religious people who look for marvels in the most unlikely places: Normal Phantom's oil-matted cockatoo who "went with the pilgrimage to Alice Springs in the 1980s to be blessed by the Pope"; golden-skinned Elias Smith who had simply walked out of the sea one day like the coming of a prophet; or Mozzie Fishman, a second Moses, leading convoys of battered cars from one end of the country to another, following the ancient Dreamways.

And the writing! Here are Mozzie's followers starting out on another morning of their journey: "The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every watercourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony for the guardians of Gondwanaland." This is one of Alexis Wright's simpler passages, but it shows her extraordinary combination of literary sophistication with the aboriginal spirit that is her birthright. When she really gets going, she has a jazzy language that is part Salman Rushdie, part Nashville, and entirely her own: "Over time, the whirly-whirly local winds composed much of the new music for the modern times. The winds squeezed through every crack and hole to loosen sheets of corrugated iron for the salt in the air to rust nails that went pop, until all those old pieces of tin whined, whistled, banged, and clapped. Every day, all day and all night sometimes, the town jammed jazz with bits of loose tin slapping around on top of the mud-stained fibro walls to pummel the crumbling, white-ant-ridden, honeycombed timber frames, until one day, only paint held up those buildings."

So what's not to like? CARPENTARIA is a novel in much the same sense that Steinbeck's CANNERY ROW is one -- a series of tales about oddball characters that only gradually coalesce around a single narrative line. But Wright's chapters are longer and her situations stranger, with much less of the familiar to anchor the floundering reader. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book while it was in my hands, but curiously reluctant to pick it up again once it had left them. For a long time, the book lacks sufficient forward momentum to truly qualify as a novel. However, somewhere in the middle of its 500+ pages, a compelling story does begin to emerge, involving Normal Phantom and his youngest son Will, brain-damaged in a mining accident but gifted in other ways. And when the threads come together at the end in a tremendous cyclone that all but destroys the town, the novel becomes very moving indeed.

Carpentaria is a book that is barely able to contain itself. The pacing is off, the narration at times veers into the absurd and the characters seem to wander in and out, but just like some of the best books, it all culminates in a beautiful way. This is one of those books where the pieces are only minor but when placed together - there is a sprawling work of art laid out in front of you that encapsulates all of your senses through the sheer will, and brilliance, of Wright's mastery.

The plot revolves around a town, Desperance, and the lives of its inhabitants that are being destroyed by a mining company and the white people it brings with them to the Aboriginal lands. Of course, I'm over simplifying, this book is 500 pages. It is near impossible to say how entrancing this book truly is.

Wright's Carpentaria is truly a work of art and deserves to be read. It carries its own life and mood. There is a depth of beauty and pain to it that sets it apart from what comes along as fiction these days. Interwoven into the pages is an honest truth that we can all understand.

Knowing how much I love to read (and blog!), the good people at Atria Books/Simon & Schuster sent me an advance copy of Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria.

Wright is one of Australia's most celebrated writers, and an Aboriginal activist. Her book depicts life of these indigenous Australians via the story of a community of people in the coastal town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Specifically, she introduces us to Norm Phantom & family of the Westend, his rival Joseph Midnight of the Eastend, and the vague "white men" from the neighboring Uptown who threaten the land, traditions, and heritage of the Aboriginal people.

It's a lengthy tome - clocking in a 516 pages - and although I received my copy in mid-March, I just finished it last week after taking it with my on our trip to Puerto Rico.

Carpentaria book Truth be told, I had trouble getting into the story. It's a mystical narrative, starting with the creation of the rivers and flow of the tides explained by an ancient serpent that slithered over the land, creating the serpent-shaped water flows and taking huge breaths that cause the tides.

The writing is beautiful, with rich descriptors, like this passage about one of the main characters:

"He possessed such an enormous voice, the pitch of it could reverberate up and down the spinal cord, damage the central nervous system, and afterwards vibrate straight up the road to the town and hit the bell so hard, it would start ringing its ear piercing peal." (p. 97)

But I found the early pages confusing, with odd characters whose stories seemed truncated and disconnected.It wasn't until the second third of the book that a central narrative really presented itself, and it was at this point that I got pulled into this complicated community where legends and ghosts live side-by-side, including fisherman Norm Phantom who straddles life between his family and the sea, and the mysterious Elias Smith, who seemingly straddles life between Heaven and Earth (or, the spiritual and physical realms).

There is a constant juxtaposition of traditional Aboriginal life in Desperance with the modern "conveniences" of Uptown: Norm has a taxidermy shop where he preserves fish (and legends) for all time (yet loves his transistor radio that brings news of changes to the ozone layer). His wife Angel preserves things as well: found objects from the town dump. Son Will protests the land grab and business practices of the neighboring mine. The entire family seems intent on resisting advancement and maintaining life as they know it.

Elias is the one character who seeks change, and he suffers a dark fate. Norm continued to fish, while "Elias had become misguided like a fool into the politics of Uptown. He was far too busy to go fishing, too busy for the sea. He abandoned the lot, everything he knew, just for Uptown."

In all, it's an interesting, thought-provoking story if you can stick with it. And Wright does have a unique - at times beautiful, at times complicated - writing style. But maybe not a light, quick beach read :)

The weight of myth and history is sometimes more than the infrastructure of fiction can bear, and a novel will groan with undue stress. Generally, these days, one prefers a "real" character acting in scenes with dialogue to a heavy, "telling" voice, an omniscient narrator's literary grasping. I'm not sure how much more time I'm willing to invest in the tedious archaeology of reading this book. I'll let it review itself: "If only the town could see the power of words at work, if it could have, just for one instance, imagined what it was like to throw words around nilly-pilly, like string, to create a confusion, a pile of twists and turns, all jumbled up in a bowl like spaghetti." Or, "The countless whorled words described numerous incidents of spyglasses snooping along the unguarded coastline of crocodile-infested mangrove mudflats lacing the northern frontier." I don't doubt that for many people, this feels like "literary sensation."

I honestly do not know how to go about reviewing this book.

On the one hand, I was enthralled by the use of language by the author. I kept wanting to read the book out loud due to the rhythms and cadences of the words. I was also enthralled by the bits of mythology of the Aborigines, who have an obviously deep and rich spiritual tie to the Earth and the Sea and all of the creatures to be found in both.

On the other hand, the story itself was filled with virulent and violent racism that quite frankly, made me sick (though I believe that might have been the author's intension). The poverty and violence faced by the Aborigines over the course of the story was quite disturbing. While their spiritual life was of enormous depth, their physical lives were so desperate that they would fight with each other over scavenging rights at the garbage dump, and when one mother found a beat up but still working clock, she was overjoyed at finding White Man's time magic - so her children would know when to go to school.

I cannot even speak of how much the racist violence bothered me - and it seemed to get worse and worse as the story went on.

I had to force myself to sit down and read the book - even while I would be caught up in the magic of the prose, I would shudder at some of the events I was reading about.

I was not sure as to what star rating to give the book, but I finally decided to go with four stars. While the content took me WAY out of my comfort zone, the author's use of language was superb. I think that my failure to completely connect with the novel was more my fault as a reader than the author's fault as a writer.

I got this book because I wanted to understand why I couldn't talk to my Australian housemate. Probably Australians would never agree with me, but I think at this point the average Sydneysider is more like native Australians than she is like British or Americans, especially the younger ones of both. I think it's become a more deeply and durably exotic country than any of them know themselves. Wright might grudgingly agree with me a tiny little bit, I don't know. Look what she writes about the immigrant townspeople (paraphrased a bit):

You got to believe what was true in the homes of
Desperanians. A folk tale of ancient times elsewhere
was stored in treasure chests in the minds of these
people. A sea people such as themselves, come from
so far away to be lost, would forever have all seas
in their sights. That was their story.

The book didn't help the way I thought it might because there are almost no conversations with two people in them. There are people talking to themselves out loud, or wandering around thinking about things, and then there are massive theatrical mob scenes in towns and bars and camps with people throwing things or combing the area with torches or gawking at a disaster. There are also mob scenes where people are not in the same room but are sheltered inside their humpys or houses connected by their similar thoughts, so of course these people are not actually talking at all, since they are relatively far away from each other, though i mean...not that far, like, a few feet, not like between Australia and America far...but, although not a conversation it's written in the book as if it were one through being mediated by the cultural framework of the town's streets or the beach or the camp or the Amazon comments forum.

In spite of not helping it made me feel a lot better because her characters are oddly open and gracious toward past conversations in their memory: even though when they were actually talking it would seem to a third listener like they were getting nowhere, yelling past each other, or just, um...saying something like, trying to look for spots or flares on the sun which is impossible because it's too bright, well, it's not true. In the end everyone does speak and hear each other. And it does not matter if they repeat themselves during the conversations or not because everything echos, for years. In _Carpentaria_ no single substory, even in the sense that a conversation is a substory....it never happens in less than five years ever, and often takes much longer.

The story itself is beyond unbearable but the way it's told is brilliant enough to soothe some of the regret. definitely srsbzns.

I have been trying to read Carpentaria for the last few months. When I began reading the book, I was fascinated by Normal Phantom and angel Day. I wanted to know more about the people of Desperance. But, I am finding the book tedious to read. I read a chapter and put it down and pick up something else to read. Then I have to reread part of what I read to help me remember the story. I plan to try and finish the book, but it may take me the rest of the year.

P.S. The book won! I have tried and tried and I can not get into this book...So what good is a book the rader can not get into? There is a story to tell here but the struggle is not worth finding out. I have read WAR AND PEACE faster and it is easier to start than this

Carpentaria is an exceptionally well-written and well-conceived novel that highlights the often deadly strife between Australia's Aboriginal people and the whites who took over and run the country/continent.

Alexis Wright uses gorgeous, mystically spiritual, and fantastical description in stark contrast with the ugly facts of life in this cultural conflict, focusing on the experiences of one Aboriginal family, the Phantoms. Normal Phantom, or Norm, the family elder, is a complicated man familiar with the sea and fishing to a deeply spiritual extent, and we learn midway through the novel that he not only catches fish for food, he preserves them in a feat of artistic craftsmanship that makes the dead fish come alive with bright, better-than-lifelike, nearly magical colors. Norm is the lead voice in the novel, and the experiences Wright relates are filtered through his vision, his experiences, his prejudices, his loves, and his hatreds.

The setting is a tiny, fictional town, Desperance, (the similarity to the word desperate is not coincidental) located near the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland, the northernmost part of Australia. Desperance is run by a crowd of mean-spirited whites who have made it their business to not only put down, but to steal the native lands of, the local Aboriginals and hand over mining rights to an international company -- providing the area with jobs but also environmental despoilation. Dividing their power against the whites, the local Aboriginals have split into to camps, one of which opposed the mine's presence and the other which accepted it and its promise of payment. Norm Phantom opposed the mine, and one of the Phantom sons, Will, has plotted and performed acts against the mine that result in his being hunted by both mine and government officials. However, by marrying a woman from the opposing Aboriginal group, he has deeply alienated Norm. Much of the "action" in the novel swirls around anti-mine activity and the mine's retaliation for the opposition group's political and overtly violent attempts to put the mine out of business.

This is not an easy read, by any means. Alexis Wright's style is non-linear and episodic rather than traditional, often rapidly switching points of view, time, scene, and setting. There are many characters whose journeys weave together and apart. The reader needs to pay attention to bits of information incorporated in each scene in order to decipher where one is in the larger tale, and to keep track of the relationships between and among the characters. Following the various characters' points of view and flights of imagination is a true joy, however, and well worth the effort to keep the plot threads held together -- the resulting fabric is a masterpiece of color and pattern woven together with great skill.

I'll be honest: I only made it halfway through this novel. While I agree with other reviewers that the writing is beautiful and descriptive at times, I just did not have the stamina or willpower to finish the book. The story felt a bit sprawling and long-winded to me--and reading it was beginning to feel like a chore. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend this book to other readers, but I would warn them that they should mentally prepare themselves for a taxing read.

"Carpentaria" is an incredible novel. The second fictional work from Alexis Wright, it deals with sweeping issues such as the clash of cultures in Australia, the different goals and focuses of whites vs. those of the native Aboriginals; and does so by looking at just one small imaginary town which the author calls Desperance which is located on the very real Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland. The relations between black and white Australia play out on the small stage of Desperance, often in a violent way. The main characters in the novel are from the Phantom family, headed by Norm Phantom, though certainly his son Will is also a key character.

The characters are vivid and believable, the events are at times a bit fantastic, though as the story moves between Dreamtime and reality with a bit of legend and biblical epic mixed in it is sometimes impossible to know just how real the events are supposed to be.
The story is epic in length at over 500 pages, and though takes place in such a remote and small location, it is epic also in the scope as it deals with society on many levels, including business, politics, religion, culture, and law. It is also a book which begs to be read and re-read over and over, as there is so much to take in one can hardly absorb everything it has to say in a single reading.

This book was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, which is Australia's most prestigious award which is given to a "published novel or play which portrays Australian life in any of its phases." Alexis Wright is only the second Aboriginal writer to receive the award. Alexis Wright also received the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction as a result of this novel. That being said, some readers may find difficulty in reading this book. It is not written in a traditional style as characters come and go and side stories seemingly take the reader on journeys which can sometimes leave the reader scratching their head. For myself, I enjoyed this ride, and I believe it is done purposefully to help the reader not focus too much on any particular character, but the larger issues being represented in the story.